My friend and former colleague Seth Goldstein got front page billing last friday in the Wall Street Journal. Seth’s company, Majestic Research, offers a new form of stock research that is totally independent and proprietary. It makes money for its customers by giving them data they can’t and won’t get elsewhere. The term for companies like Seth’s is “third party research providers”, meaning that the trading ideas don’t come from the “sell side” or the “buy side”, they come from a third party to the transaction. In reality, many of the new emerging research providers are really sell side players of a new and different flavor.
Who else is in this business? Interestingly, Jack Hidary and Stanton Green’s Vista Research and Andy Klein’s Soleil Group are two important new players. Then there are two of the veterans of this business Gerson Lehrman Group and CFRA.
Seth Goldstein, Jack Hidary, and Andy Klein are veteran entrepreneurs who formed and built Site Specific, Earthweb, and Wit Capital, respectively. What do they see in the independent research market that takes them here instead of some other attractive emerging market? And what about Gerson Lehrman and CFRA? Well Bessemer Ventures just led a very large investment in Gerson Lehrman and last fall TA Associates invested $60 million into CFRA. Something big must be going on here for all of this venture/entrepreneurial activity to be happening in this sector.
As Jim Cramer (who has his own third party research group called
(Source : https://avc.com)
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